If you have an absolutely massive Lego build coming up, you’ll need a lot of tiny bricks. If you want to keep costs under control, then they best option is to buy blocks in bulk (it’s really the only option given the price of individual bricks). The problem with bulk bricks, of course, is that they are unsorted. You can buy Legos by the pound all day long, but expect to get a mess of mismatched parts and colors. And we all know that any serious adult fan of Lego needs his/her bricks organized which leads to a colossal undertaking, as demonstrated in the video above.

What you’re watching is 71 hours of Lego sorting compressed down into a 3 minute time-lapse. During that time period 100 boxes of Legos — 65,000 pieces — were sorted and stacked in preparation for an upcoming build. The sorting was done by hand, by no more than two people at a time, in a kind of brick-stacking torture that would make Sisyphus break down and weep.

Why, you ask? Why sort 65,000 Legos, by both color and size, into foot-long stacks? And why document the process in a series of 12,775 photographs?

Short answer: It was done for promotional purposes. The group behind the sorting, Rymdreglage, created the internet-famous 8-bit Trip video on YouTube (which has over 12M views) and they are planning on doing a second video, 8-bit Trip 2. So at least they have a worthy purpose for all that labor.

Of course if the group was truly clever they would have used Dynaway’s Lego sorting machine, which we covered in January. That machine isn’t quite as fast as a two-person team of human sorters, but it is a much more efficient way to tackle the job. With the bricks sorted into bins by machine, the only human intervention needed would be to refill a hopped a few times an hour and to stack the Legos. The total time invested would be a fraction of 71 hours. Of course you’d need to build and seriously customize the Lego sorting machine, which could take some time…